Fluoroimmunoassay for neonatal thyrotropin screening in dried blood spots

Conclusions The time-resolved fluoroimmunometric assay for neonatal TSH using Europium fluorescence (DELFIA neonatal TSH, LKB) is a rapid, sufficiently precise, accurate and sensitive method. Because of the better precision in comparision to the RIA method particularly in the lower range the recall rate will be lowered.The advantage of the high sensitivity is the reduced test volume of the very limited material of neonatal blood. The assay described here is therefore an improvement in screening for neonatal hypothyroidism.

---

Bestimmung des neonatalen TSH mit einem Fluorescenzimmunoassay

     

Intraband carrier kinetics and picosecond pulse shaping in field-enhanced bulk semiconductor absorbers

Picosecond pulse propagation through a field-enhanced waveguide bulk semiconductor saturable absorber is studied numerically. Fast switching from unsaturated absorption to delayed strong saturation and gain, as well as the predicted dependence of saturation energy on electric field, is based on intraband carrier kinetics and electric-field dynamics in the absorber and can lead to improved, controllable pulse shaping.     

Prediction of cyclohexane-water distribution coefficients with COSMO-RS on the SAMPL5 data set

The Conductor-Like-Screening-Model for Real Solvents (COSMO-RS) method has been used for the blind prediction of cyclohexane-water distribution coefficients logD within the SAMPL challenge. The partition coefficient logP of the neutral species was calculated first and then corrected for dissociation or protonation, as appropriate for acidic or basic solutes, to obtain the cyclohexane-water logD. Using the latest version of the COSMOtherm implementation, this approach in combination with a rigorous conformational sampling yielded a predictive accuracy of 2.11 log units (RMSD) for the 53 compounds of the blind prediction dataset. By that it was the most accurate of all contest submissions and it also achieved the best rank order. The RMSD mainly arises from a group of outliers in the negative logD range, which at least partly may arise from dimerization or other experimental problems coming up for very polar molecules in very non-polar solvents.     

Engineered Upconversion Nanoparticles for Resolving Protein Interactions inside Living Cells

Upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) convert near‐infrared into visible light at much lower excitation densities than those used in classic two‐photon absorption microscopy. Here, we engineered <50 nm UCNPs for application as efficient lanthanide resonance energy transfer (LRET) donors inside living cells. By optimizing the dopant concentrations and the core–shell structure for higher excitation densities, we observed enhanced UCNP emission as well as strongly increased sensitized acceptor fluorescence. For the application of these UCNPs in complex biological environments, we developed a biocompatible surface coating functionalized with a nanobody recognizing green fluorescent protein (GFP). Thus, rapid and specific targeting to GFP‐tagged fusion proteins in the mitochondrial outer membrane and detection of protein interactions by LRET in living cells was achieved.